The virulent demons that are inhabiting you are not grotesque little monsters with thrashing tales. They are illusions, stories you are telling yourself that are utterly fallacious; bizarre and fantastic lies which you nevertheless believe, and which consequently are taking your life from you.

~ Martin Bell, The Way of the Wolf

Predicaments are unfolding processes that ask us move and compensate through oscillating cycles and seasons, adjusting our stance and calibrating our response to a living, shifting, transforming landscape on a daily basis.

The query I am sitting with focuses on the challenges of chronic conditions, about how/if psychotherapists can identify “progress” in such cases, how we assess if the lack of “progress” is a treatment failure, and how we manage our own responses to chronicity when we encounter it in our work lives.

Maybe this was the moment I could have helped her avoid some of the suffering that was to come. Maybe if we had done this work together, it would have been less terrifying for her to let go, and she wouldn’t have been trapped for so long.

You are who happened to you.

I’ve buried many of people I’ve been closest to. Maybe it’s actually dangerous to be my friend (I have considered this and ruled it out for the most part).  Or maybe those of us who have lived in various kinds of danger find each other and we don’t always make it through, or we die much later of wounds we thought were nothing at the time.

Sometime the presence of goodness is incidental, and not redemptive. Maybe it is never safe to look back.

Arnold Mindell died on June 10th.

I never met him. I never registered for any of his workshops. Never talked to him or wrote him. Don’t know much about him other than what he and his wife have written about themselves and their work.

He made me nervous.

He came out of some long-ago cereal box or illegal chocking-hazard chocolate egg and tarted traveling with us when my husband and I were still career building and child-free. For twenty-five years or more he has lain in a coin dish or stood resolutely on a windowsill next to a few pretty rocks. He keeps sticking to us, moving with us from home to home.

“a picture of myself, living in two different ages simultaneously, and being two different persons”

Do not grieve. Misfortune will happen to the wisest of men.

Exploring emergent creativity and adjacent possibility

I can't remember my mother's birthday.
On one hand this is not a big deal. We were never a huge birthday or holiday family. When my own comes around I often think of it as a Tuesday or a Thursday rather than as a birth-a-versary…

Sometimes nowadays, people refer to me as a “teacher” – not a schoolteacher, but some kind of “teacher” of adults. But it seems to me that to see oneself as a teacher, in the strange spaces that I work in – focused on mortality, spirituality, dreams, psychology, mysticism and liberation is utterly audacious.

I am absolutely telling a shaggy dog tale - because I think that our wish for stories to proceed in a straight line and end with a satisfying climax has little to do with living, and that our notions about what parts of a story are relevant or not are skewed. Sometimes the most important part of a story lies in the details we dismiss as unimportant. Sometimes a story has greater power if we consider it an unfolding process that we are immersed in, that will emerge, recede, and reveal itself to us over time without a button at the end.